I’m impressed. Rachel Kendall, the high priestess presiding over the cult mag Sein Und Werden has typed up the entire latest issue (guest edited by Marc Lowe) on an old fashioned antique typewriter thingy in order to capture the correct grungey ethos for this issue’s theme: “Sur-Noir”, an exotic blend of Noir crime writing and the Surreal. She has even filled out a USA State Attorney’s Probable Cause of Crime Affidavit form for the contents list. Dedication or what? This issue includes what is probably one of the most surreal stories I have ever written, called “The Sleep Corporation”, about a police detective who finds himself invited to a very strange party in the middle of the night… Go on order yourself up a copy, it only costs a recession-busting £2.50 right now.

Sein und Werden is one of those great little magazines that cannot be pigeonholed but is always guaranteed to delight, shock and infuriate. Is it a horror magazine, a very, very dark fantasy publication, literature, avant garde? Well, all of those things and none. And, like a pill that will be good for you, it must be swallowed whole.

“Every story presents yet another side of the creature that’s sometimes female, and sometimes male, but the gender is not important since it is solely external. The internal is rather unisexual, and it never changes; it’s constant and still like the look of the dead. I’m talking about a self-igniting feeling of the void inherent in all characters on Kendall’s canvas. They were born to be tore apart, dismembered, trampled dawn. The swarming world of passions lures them, promising pleasures, but plunging into the pool of boiling bloods brings them no satisfaction. They only learn that their creator screwed them up and they’ve come to this world like plastic toys, completely lacking sensations. The discovery is shocking, they watch life behind the glass wall.”…